foxycleop has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello there, I am a new user here and new to perl as well. I am wondering if someone can help me with an issue I am having with CSV files.
I have downloaded CSV files from an internet source (it is marketing data). I have written a PERL program to read the contents of the file so that I can work with the data. However, when I read the file and print it to a different file or to screen I get an output that looks something like this:

After playing with he data in different ways, I found a couple of things:
1. If I copy the data (copy/paste) to a new csv file, the output looks fine.
2. So I thought that since the data is fine, there must be something wrong with the file itself as I have downloded it from the internet. So I went in the property and found the message: "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer". There was an unblock option right next to this message which I pressed to unlock the file. I tried running the program again on the unblocked file but the output is still non-readable.
Does anyone know if there is a fix to this because I have many files that I am working with and it would be a big hassle to copy paste data into new files. It would defeat the whole idea of learning programming. Thanks for any help.
===================================
The original CSV looks like (it is all English):

Also, the data is obtained form a paid marketing data site so there is no direct URL provided, A window opens up with the download link (JAVASCRIPT) to download the CSV file. I am downloading manually not sure how you would use LWP::Simple to d/l that data .

It would be helpful to your readers to know what your original CSV looks like it before you process it, and what "looks fine" really means, however I can say that it sure appears to be HTML entity codes for CJK unified ideographs. From this I presume "looks fine" probably means "is made up of mixed English and Chinese text". Whatever you use to display the contents of this file must be able to decode this HTML, so many basic text editors will probably get it wrong. So the browser you're using probably looks fine when I copy a chunk from your example without code tags:

礀漀最愀 洀愀琀 crescent moon yoga mat

At this point I don't know where you want to go with this. If you only want the English, it is relatively simple to strip out the HTML entity codes, but if you still want it to be bilingual you will need to keep them and display only through a device that understands them. Fortunately for me I'm blissfully unaware of the wonders of Unicode, but one place to start may be HTML::Entities. I can't offer more than that, but I'm sure many others here can if you can be more specific about your needs and intentions.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other